Invardii Box Set 2

by Warwick Gibson

  He wasn’t able to add much. The door into the mining base had opened when the torpedo team were laying the explosive charges, and they had been swept into the base on the current that had been generated. He’d banged his head and couldn’t remember anything else, nor did he know what had happened to the other two on his team.

  Ayman was pleased to get this much information. It left two members of the second torpedo team unaccounted for, but it could have been worse. As he was thinking about the two lost crew members, his navs officer reported in, his voice sharp with excitement.

  “More Reaper ships coming out of star drive, Sir! Still getting a grip on the number of energy signatures, but there’s something else. There are flagships coming as well! No idea how many yet, but the star drive readouts are too massive to be anything else. We’ll let you know as soon as we can confirm numbers. Navs out.”

  Ayman sat down in his chair on the bridge. He sat down very slowly indeed. That would do it, he thought, grimly satisfied. That would make up enough of an enemy force to justify calling in the Valkrethi.

  Cagill got the call from Ayman at mid-morning. The Valkrethi riders had stayed up late around a driftwood fire exchanging news with Menon and Metris. Much had happened while the Hud pilots in the company had been away training on the Valkrethi.

  Now they were together again after a light breakfast, waiting on the call from the task force at the Barrens.

  Cagill called the riders together as soon as the call from Ayman came through. There wasn’t much he needed to say to them about the work that lay ahead. This was what they’d trained for, and they had already gone up against an Invardii force bigger than this one, and destroyed it down to the last ship.

  “Don’t get overconfident,” he told them, “and don’t take anything for granted. Work together, stay cautious, and don’t take on the flagships until I give the order. Taking on the flagships will have to be a team effort, and I want you to remember that! No individual actions!”

  He looked suspiciously at the research team, but they looked innocently back and nodded in agreement.

  “Mount up,” he said, “and if you know how, say a prayer for all of us.”

  Cagill didn’t know if those prayers would be answered or not, but he knew how the prayer of a believer focused that person’s mind and cut out the chatter of the ego. People in that state of mind tended to survive.

  The Valkrethi stood on the beach outside the cave, under the brilliant sun of a fine, clear Hud day. Menon and Metris stood in the cave mouth, looking up at the huge forms. Each one looked so much like the rider who nestled inside it. Menon shook his head in wonderment.

  The riders brought up the optic shields and opened a connection between themselves and the Reaper ships further out in the system, which appeared as blinking red dots. The riders could all see the imposing energy signatures of the six Invardii flagships.

  That must be every one of the giant flagships they’ve got left, thought Cagill wonderingly. The Valkrethi were making a difference. But for now the riders had to block the flagships out of their thoughts.

  They had a job to do. They had to fall on the Reaper ships carrying the vengeance of every family relocated to another planet and every city destroyed by the Invardii armadas over the savage years that had gone before.

  CHAPTER 25

  ________________

  It would take all the power they had to escape from the planet’s gravity well and make it as far as the enemy ships, even with the power stored in the dipole systems and the energy efficiency of the Valkrethi. The giant figures would have to immerse themselves in the shields of the Reaper ships as soon as they had completed the jump. It would restore their energy levels to normal.

  The first handful of Valkrethi lifted off the beach, gently at first, and then more quickly. Others followed. Menon and Metris strained to see the bright shapes against the sun, and then the Valkrethi were mere sparks of light as they soared higher into the planet’s atmosphere. Then they were gone.

  The giant figures left the planet behind them, and took a new bearing. They were headed for the swirling confusion of Reaper ships and Javelins near the edge of the planetary system. They accelerated more sharply now, their riders beginning the vigorous breathing they used to keep themselves conscious in the middle of such elongated jumps. Then they were slammed the other way in their restraints, and the Valkrethi started decelerating.

  Celia chose an enemy ship on the edge of the action, and slid in past an attacking Javelin to lodge in the ship’s shimmering orange shields. She watched the exhilarating display as vast arcs of plasma energy sliced away from her, toward the Javelin.

  The Alliance ship twisted under the arcs to rake the bottom of the Reaper ship with a broadside of super-dense slugs. Then the Javelin twisted away, its navs officer recognizing a Valkrethi energy signature.

  The energy readings of Celia’s Valkrethi climbed past the halfway mark, and she turned her head as another figure dropped into the shield beside her, and then another. She increased the magnification of her optics until she could see both of them clearly. The nearest one turned its head side on to her, and she recognized one of Cagill’s pilots. The other lifted its hand in greeting across the sea of flame, and she recognized Roberto.

  She felt her stomach lurch, and told herself to stop reacting so strongly to his presence. She believed if she didn’t keep a tight lid on her feelings, she would slide toward a place that was, for her, a place of shame and betrayal.

  She saw that her mount’s energy levels had returned to normal. It was a blessing to get away from her thoughts, and back into the fight. She worked her way through the shields and dropped onto a hub directly below her, followed by a short sideways link to a larger hub further on. She landed on its surface moments later.

  Now it was time to show the Invardii what the Valkrethi could do! She punched both fists down through the surface of the hub, and wriggled into the interior. She discovered that she had entered a storage bay of some sort. Orienting herself from her point of entry, she dug down toward the middle of the hub. It didn’t take long before she found one of the power plants that ran the Invardii ships.

  For a moment Celia wondered where the other two Valkrethi were, but then she decided they would be okay if she destroyed the ship. She looked up at the now familiar central column as it towered above her, and saw the surrounding balconies filling with the orange shapes of Invardii in their active phase.

  Time to take this ship out of the fight, she decided, and ripped the pulsing plasma cables off the central tower. The power plant filled with incandescent material that vaporized everything it touched. There was a moment of bright light, followed by the Valkrethi’s optics overloading, and then she was back in space again. She was at the center of an expanding ring of debris, mute testimony to the destruction of the Reaper ship.

  Ahead of her one of the flagships was beset by a squadron of Javelins. Using their extraordinary reflexes to advantage, the Hud pilots kept their ships away from the thick ropes of plasma that snaked out toward them. It was clear, however, that the Javelins had no answer to the size and power of the massive Invardii warship.

  Celia looked around for other Valkrethi forming up nearby. Cagill had been adamant that the flagships would only be attacked when there was a full team of Valkrethi to do so. A pulsing blue point formed in her optics, denoting an assembly point. She formed a link to the coordinates, and arrived as several other Valkrethi did. Cagill was one of them.

  “This is unknown territory, people,” he said, once they had all linked into an open comms circuit. “We don’t want the Valkrethi hit by the flagship plasma weapons, so choose your line of attack carefully.

  “I want you to work in pairs. Once you’re inside the flagship, it won’t be possible to maintain open comms links unless they’re line of sight. If one of you goes down, the other gets him or her out of there. Got it?”

  They all grunted an assent.

  Celia teamed up with
one of the Hud pilots, as did the others in the research team. She was quietly pleased. Rather than just being observers, the research team had now been accepted as part of the fighting formation. They were brothers and sisters in arms with the pilots, and that felt good.

  Then she realized it wasn’t just her acceptance as part of the fighting unit that made her feel good. She realized how angry she really was. Angry at the students who had mocked and embarrassed her when she was young, angry at the world of academia which had given her security but shut her off from life, and just, well, angry at everything.

  She tightened the Valkrethi’s massive fists at its sides. For some cantankerous reason or another – fueled by the anger within her – she was looking forward to the attack on the Invardii flagship.

  The formation began to break up, each pair looking for a way to get under the angry red coils that lashed out from the flagship at anything that moved. A wave of Javelins swarmed the front of the flagship, and Celia nodded to the pilot she was paired with, sending his optics an arrival point on the side of the vast enemy ship.

  He gave the thumbs up sign, and they looped out from their present position, as if making a bypass of the enemy ship, only to loop round at the last minute and disappear between two giant mountings on the side of the flagship.

  Celia moved her orientation through ninety degrees, and the side of the flagship became a level floor under her. The two Valkrethi knelt on the metal deck in a long alleyway. Reaching down, Celia plunged both fists into the deck beneath her, and came to an abrupt halt. It was like running into a brick wall.

  It was clear the Invardii had replaced the lighter hub and spar construction of the Reaper ships with heavy duty structural integrity on the flagships. The pilot motioned for her to stand back, and placed his hands a shoulder width apart on the deck.

  A current ran from one hand to the other, stripping away the metal like an acid bath. He pushed his hands further into the deck, and increased the current. Celia watched in fascination. The riders were learning things about the Valkrethi all the time, but she had never seen this before.

  When he finally broke through the decking, they could see it was more than a hand’s width thick – and that was a Valkrethi hand width at that! Celia wondered if this level of over-engineering continued throughout the flagship. She realized the flagships were meant to be invincible, completely unstoppable. What a shock it would be to the Invardii if the Valkrethi could destroy one!

  The pilot opened a comms link to her. “That’s completely emptied my reserves. The internal power plant has started to replenish them, but it’s going to take time. If you want to enter the ship you’ll have to take the lead.”

  Celia nodded, to signify that she understood. Then she decided they should go for it. Her reserves were still at full strength.

  If any of the other pairs had got this far, they would have used up as much energy, and someone had to try and disable the flagship. She pointed down the hole the pilot had made, and he nodded his agreement. Forcing back one of the sides a little, and then the other, Celia worked her way down through the deck, and dropped into whatever was below.

  The two of them landed in darkness. Celia changed her optics to infrared, and looked around at what seemed to be a storage room on a mammoth scale. She checked for atmosphere, and found none. There hadn’t been any on the Reaper ships either.

  If the Invardii did use a carbon-oxygen breathing system, they did it by binding the oxygen directly to a transfer molecule and dumping it in the bloodstream. It made sense. Lungs were too inefficient.

  Then Celia shook her head at the idea the Invardii were limited to oxygen. It was likely they used the more powerful silicon-sulfur combination, but she also doubted they had any use for a bloodstream. It would be too vulnerable, too weak a link in their hybrid systems.

  Checking that the pilot was right behind her, Celia moved to a lavishly carved archway on her right. If she had been expecting some sort of symmetry in the door she was mistaken. Like the ornate fashioning of the Reaper ships, the archway looked like it had been built by an artist under the influence of something mind-altering. It was a badly distorted figure eight.

  The two Valkrethi passed silently into a long corridor of enormous proportions, and had to crouch as the ceiling height stepped down half way along. A closed door to their left caught Celia’s attention. It looked like a doorway leading to somewhere important. There was a lot of electronic hardware around it that might be a security lock.

  She turned back toward the pilot, pointed to the door, and nodded. He moved aside. Stepping back against the opposite wall Celia lifted one giant Valkrethi foot and rammed it through the door, her shoulders providing leverage against the wall behind.

  The door was instantly outlined in circular bars of light. These doubled in speed, and she figured she had set off an electronic tripwire of some sort. There were no audible alarms.

  Reaching in through the hole her foot had made, she tore a big section out of the door, and then ripped the door out of the wall. She dropped it to the floor as she stepped inside, and the pilot followed her. They looked around in amazement.

  There was no way of telling what shape the room was. It was outlined in a soft blackness with a lifelike representation of stars in all directions. Some of the more prominent stars were connected to others by webs of lines, and Celia wondered if it was a navigational map of the galaxy.

  The pilot nudged her, and she looked upward. In the center of the room a handful of Invardii in their orange, humanoid state hung motionless. Next to them were small orange spheres of various sizes. The largest of the spheres had taken on rudimentary humanoid shapes as well.

  “Godsdammit, it’s a nursery!” said Celia on the open channel, then wished she hadn’t. One of the Invardii ‘mothers’ stirred, and turned toward them, away from the orange sphere it was cradling in its rough-shaped hands.

  Can’t hear me banging down the door, but it picks up a stray comms signal nearby, said Celia, irritated with herself. Then she began to back slowly toward the door. The pilot followed. Another of the Invardii turned in their direction, and they fled.

  CHAPTER 26

  ________________

  The corridor ended in a large bay, with enormous doors along one side. If her sense of direction was right, the doors would open to the outside of the ship. As the two of them burst into the bay other doors opened, and a flood of orange Invardii poured through them.

  They carried a number of large, gray machines, several Invardii to each one. They set them down, and rapidly deployed them. Something that looked unpleasantly like the business end of a weapon was soon pointing in Celia’s direction.

  She didn’t like the look of that. The pilot pointed nervously behind him, and it was clear there were more of the hybrid Invardii coming in from that direction as well. Hurrying toward the inner wall of the cargo bay, Celia prepared to dig her way through to another part of the flagship.

  As she ripped a hole in the wall, one of the gray machines fired, and the blast slammed her forward. Then the other machines opened up, and she was hit by several discharges at once. The force of it knocked her through the wall and into a dark chamber beyond.

  For a moment she blanked out. When she came round, her optics were offline. She went to lift herself up, and found only her head and one arm responded. Great, she thought, as she struggled to rise. Blind and crippled inside an alien flagship, with a thousand or more Invardii on board. This will not end well.

  She heard the sound of a number of sickening thumps back in the loading bay, and then some horrendous crunching noises.

  It sounds like the pilot is getting his as well, she muttered to herself resignedly. If it had to end this way, she couldn’t think of anything better to be doing than defending the Alliance from arrogant pigs like the Invardii.

  Except maybe taking advantage of Roberto when he was drunk and would forget what he had done in the morning, she thought with a smile. She wished she’d ta
ken a chance with him now. Now, when it didn’t matter, and no one would ever know!

  She was distracted as a number of small lights flickered briefly along the bottom of her optic shield. A moment later it came back online. She watched in growing amazement as the Valkrethi repaired itself.

  System after system came back to life. Strength returned to her limbs, and she sat up. Some systems were sidelined, too damaged to repair quickly, while others ran low-grade equivalents to replace them.

  She had known the Valkrethi were sophisticated, powerful machines, but now she realized they were far more adaptable than it seemed possible. She stood up, and realized she had just risen, phoenix-like, from her own ashes. Two quick steps took her back into the loading bay, where she found the last of the Invardii in full retreat. The pilot turned and smiled at her.

  “They got off some lucky shots at you. I jumped over their heads and came down behind their machines – good thing there’s a lot of room in here – and broke some heads.” A number of bent and broken cylinders lay at his feet. Celia smiled.

  He pointed to a set of massive doors opposite, and together they ran through the cargo bay and down the corridor on the other side.

  Celia stopped a little further on, and ripped a hole in the wall. She was choosing a direction she thought would take them deeper into the flagship. She began digging her way forward, and for a while she struck hard going. The two of them passed through a series of smaller spaces that were crammed with goods, but then she emerged into an enormous shaft.

  It dropped away out of sight below her, and that was the direction she wanted to go. All around the walls were smaller versions of the plasma cables she had seen in the reactor rooms on the Reaper ships.

  Yes! Now they were getting somewhere.

  The pilot forced his way through the wall of the shaft behind her, and looked down the long descent. He stepped back a little from the edge when he saw how far it went. Celia was about to rip the plasma cables off the walls when she hesitated. These were small fry really, they needed to find a major power plant if they wanted to do some real damage.